Data related to current customers and potential customers can be very valuable to a software provider. A software provider may acquire this customer data by requesting customer data through a software application. For example, if a potential customer downloads a free software trial offered by a provider through its website, the provider can request information from the potential customer. Some potential customers tend to be cautious about providing their personal information to a software provider, particularly for a software product or a software provider with which they're not yet very familiar. Therefore, abandonment rates for free software trials and website registrations may be significant.
A software provider may face the challenge of maximizing the amount and quality of customer data that it collects from current and potential customers through its software and website. The software provider may also want to minimize the percentage of customers that abandon the registration process. At the same time, the software provider may seek to maximize the amount of customer data that it requests and receives from each visitor.
A user visiting a website may encounter a request from the website for the user's personal information (i.e., customer data). The website may generate and display identical requests for customer data for every user. In addition, the website may require customer data at the beginning of every user's session or at random times. The abandonment rate for a registration process may be significant since users may be cautious about providing personal information before being better able to evaluate whether the software product is worth their attention.
A registration process for a software application such as a website may request too much or too little customer data from users. Some users tend to avoid providing several items of personal information to the website. Other users may provide all of the customer data that the website requests. By using a registration process that does not tailor its requests, a website may alienate some cautious users while unnecessarily limiting the scope of requested customer data from other users who are already more highly engaged with the product.